Employee experience is not a one-and-done endeavor—it’s both a success-determining variable and an organizational ecosystem that brands must pay constant attention to. Much like customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) is about forging human connections that make people feel a fundamental, emotional link to a company’s people, goals, and vision.
A methodology called the Success Framework challenges an organization to think about employee experience and is key to achieve these connections. It is comprised of five steps:
- Design
- Listen
- Understand
- Transform
- Realize
Design
A lot of brands jump right into turning employee listening posts on and marketing that as the start of their EX program. However, the Success Framework encourages brands to consider an element that must come before that: design.
Many brands overlook doing some homework and thinking critically about what EX goals they need their program to accomplish. Pre-planning and consultation are both crucial to a healthy EX program.
There are two critical elements that should inform your program design process: the gap between your current and desired culture, and the link between employee experience and your organization’s strategic business outcomes. Relatedly, how willing employees are to provide candid and/or anonymized feedback (about their experience or customers).
The more employees see leadership acting on their feedback, the more they’ll be willing to share as they begin to trust that their feedback is valued (and anonymized).
Understand that an improved employee experience is more than a nice-to-have and that it truly impacts your bottom line is also critically important. Leaders make daily decisions about organizational investments based on expected returns, so being able to articulate how employee feedback ties to tangible operational and financial improvements is a must.
Employee feedback can improve process efficiencies and resolve customer issues more effectively, helping your organization retain those customers. Plus, the idea that increased engagement leads to lower absenteeism, greater productivity, and lower employee attrition will grab the attention of decision-makers who control budgets. Engaging with stakeholders about your program’s business impact before requesting investment will put your effort on the right track out of the gate.
Listen
This step of the Success Framework can look pretty different for your interactions with employees versus customers. Whereas engaged, or angry, customers are only too happy to spill the beans on everything they liked or disliked about an experience, getting employees to do the same is very contingent upon that trust factor we touched on earlier. The other game-changer here is that figuring out how much employees trust your brand doesn’t end with the design step—the tools and methods you use to listen to them affect their trust as well.
When it comes to listening, you need to meet employees where they’re at. Employees are extremely sensitive about divulging critical intelligence, particularly with organizations that are early on in their EX journey.
Organizations must be thoughtful about how this effort is communicated and must ensure that surveys are designed with the level of anonymity that employees expect. For example, it should be made clear that local engagement is most helpful for bringing about change, so employee location/geography should be expected as a demographic. That approach supports a balance between assuring employees that their feedback is anonymous while also ensuring that the feedback is useful to your team and program.
On the other hand, voice of employee (VoE) feedback about the customer experience is focused on CX improvement versus the internal employee experience. In this scenario, organizations that want to gain the most powerful intelligence should seek employee input on where, when, and how employees feel they can provide the most productive feedback.
Understand
Disseminating and digesting employee feedback is another process that requires a different lens than that used for processing customer feedback. It also depends a lot on how anonymized and confidential (two different things, by the way) employee feedback is once it’s collected.
One of the most challenging elements of understanding your feedback is working with departments and leaders whom the feedback is about to ensure they don’t take complaints too negatively. Receiving and dealing with customer feedback is one thing, but it can be even harder for some leaders to accept criticism from within their company. The truth is that accepting negative feedback with grace is the only way to expect additional honest feedback from employees at all
